The Galway city and county councils are facing punishment from the Government in the form of cuts to services over non-payment of the household charge.
This is according to Galway West Fianna Fáil TD Éamon Ó Cuív who accused the Government of trying to “shift blame for their failure on the household charge fiasco” onto the State’s local authorities.
Dep Ó Cuív has alleged that Environment Minister Phil Hogan is threatening to “punish those areas” where the household charge has not been successfully collected “by cutting local services to the entire community”.
The Connemara based TD said the faults, misconceptions, and the fact that just under half of all households had not paid the charge by the March 31 deadline, is “entirely Phil Hogan and the Government’s fault” and is “not the fault of local authority workers in Galway or anywhere else”.
“The Government made a mess of this from the beginning,” he said, “by forcing a flat-rate charge on people regardless of their ability to pay; by failing to provide the proper information to the public; by failing to allow people to pay in a variety of ways including in their local post office; and by failing to give people enough time to pay by instalment.”
Dep Ó Cuív said that instead of threatening local authorities, the Government should “put its hands up, admit that they made a mistake, and extending the deadline to the end of the September”.
He said such an extension would allow for a proper information campaign and allow people to pay in a variety of ways.
He has also challenged Galway West Government TDs Sean Kyne, Brian Walsh, and Derek Nolan over whether or not they “stand by their colleagues’ claims that gaps in household charge payments locally are the fault of Galway city and county council workers, and not the Government?”.
Dep Ó Cuív also wants them to clarify their position on Minister Hogan’s plans to cut local services if the Government has not succeeded in collecting the household charge from all homes across County Galway.
